Arts news

• Wayne Thiebaud obituary

  31-12-2021 18:50
  
  Artist whose colourful 1960s paintings of cakes and pies evoked an earlier era of American consumerismFew artists can claim Willem de Kooning and Walt Disney as equal influences in their work. The California painter Wayne Thiebaud was one.Thiebaud, who has died aged 101, signed on as an “in-betweener” at the Disney Studios in Los Angeles as a teenager, filling in the backgrounds to Mickey Mouse cartoons whose figures were drawn by experienced animators. For the rest of his long life,
  
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• Stick men, scrawls and all that jazz: how AR Penck made great art look simple

  31-12-2021 15:00
  
  With his odd symbols and signs, the East German painter created a ‘democratic’ style in defiance of the state. A new exhibition shows how his vision was inspired by the trauma of conflict and the cold warIn 1979, the Stasi entered Ralf Winkler’s Dresden studio and trashed the place. It was the culmination of a harassment campaign against the artist, who found fame under the pseudonym AR Penck, for refusing to make social-realist propaganda.Instead, his paintings featured oft-re
  
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